


Darcy Lewis: Happy Funtimes Consultant

by lynndyre



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:33:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Project management of induced cultural interaction via recorded media</p><p>or</p><p>Darcy organizes movie nights.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darcy Lewis: Happy Funtimes Consultant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snack_size](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snack_size/gifts).



> Every Darcy fan is required to write a 'Darcy works with the Avengers' fic, right? :)  
> I hope you enjoy!

Once upon a time, in a city far, far away (unless you live in New York), there was a Darcy. 

The short version? Because aliens.

The long version was sorta classified, and involved making nice with the MIBs so that she could talk to Thor again, a lot of briefings, Coulson the Ipod Thief, who wasn't a bad guy when you got to know him, and a job interview with Stark Industries, wherein Ms Potts complimented Darcy's ability to work with a range of individuals under stressful conditions, and Mr Stark complimented her rack.

It was a very nice rack.

And so Darcy was on Tony fucking Stark's payroll as – no shit – 'Happy Funtimes Consultant', which turned out to have way less to do with drugs and booze and loud stripper-filled parties; and more to do with trying to get a bunch of crazy awesome people (all really awesome, but also all _really crazy_ ) to play nice and actually enjoy each other's company without all the different brands of crazy twanging on each other's last nerve. Or, you know, without anybody turning green and trashing New York again.

Movie night selection turns out to need a lot of thought. Blockbusters are okay for Thor and Clint, and sometimes for Bruce, but Tony will switch off, Natasha's hard to read, and Steve's iffy on a lot of them. Darcy starts to branch out into older stuff beyond just the classics, she wants to figure out what makes him tick.

At first guess, given the _totally censored_ (pages of black bars, seriously) briefings she got on Black Widow and Hawkeye, she'd have figured spy movies would be right out, but they turn out to love them – especially Clint, and especially if they're really stupid. Bond movies are a definite yes, if Pepper is around to sit on Tony's hands for him. Without Pepper-shaped distractions, he makes prototypes of the Q-gadgets. Out of other people's electronics.

One of these days, Darcy's gonna figure out what the universe has against a her ipods.

In the meantime Man from UNCLE gets a yes, for being cheesy as hell and easy for everyone to laugh at, and Inception gets a fuck no, because Darcy is not putting a movie about mindfucks in front of these guys EVER AT ALL. 

Mysteries seem safe enough, a good pick for when people need to wind down. Providing, of course, that the bad guy gets caught and put away at the end. (The Law & Order incident is filed under not- to- be- spoken- of, but Darcy's much more careful after that.) Period mysteries turn out to be a favourite of Natasha's, especially things like Poirot and Foyle's War. Darcy's not quite sure why, but it feels good to know something Natasha likes, because the part of Darcy that's clearly a moron wishes she could brighten things up for Natasha, sometimes, the way she used to do for Jane. 

As a gamble, she added Jeeves and Wooster to their to-watch que. It confused the heck out of Thor, but Natasha gave Darcy a genuine, quiet smile that made Darcy zing with pride at having got it right.

Comedy as a genre was harder to balance. Cultural cues had a lot to do with humor and what people would find funny, and the Avengers Tower had an intergalactic range of cultures. Physical comedy was okay, crudity wasn't (Adam Sandler and Clerks got vetoed extra hard), and anything too steeped in cultural references would go straight over two very attractive blond heads, while anything too old (Finnian's Rainbow) often got exaggerated snoring from the Tony corner. Harvey, on the other hand, went over great, and Darcy knew for a fact she was gonna end up picturing JARVIS as an invisible bunny in a butler outfit.

Darcy wondered if she should have taken sociology instead of political science, just to be able to write a paper on the effects of Monty Python's Flying Circus on cultural understanding. Either they laughed at the joke, or they laughed at the fact they had no idea what the joke was supposed to be – and either way it was one of the silliest, most epic nights Darcy had ever had sober.

Also, she now had video of Captain America and Hawkeye re-enacting the fish slapping dance.

With pillows.

Barefoot.

There was something really hot about Captain America barefoot.

There was something really hot about Steve regardless, but Darcy gathered the fraying strands of her secondhand professionalism, and wore thicker bras so that her nipples didn't give her away by hardening into little points of want every time Steve picked a spot next to her on the couch. 

Telling him to his face that he smelled good enough to roll in might have been enough of a giveaway already.

Speculative fiction was a pitched battle of Star Trek versus Star Wars. Tony was firmly in the To Boldly Go camp, with Bruce as his second. Clint voted for Star Wars on the grounds of 'more shooting stuff. And lightsabers. Always lightsabers.' Pepper reluctantly raised her hand as a Trekkie, while Thor declared himself on the side of the Force. Steve said he'd loved them both, but under the joint Tony-Clint onslaught picked Star Wars, and when forced to admit his reasoning he blushed up to his ears and admitted it was because of Leia.

Darcy wondered how hard a costume that would be to find for Halloween, and then yeeped at Tony's smirk that said he probably knew exactly what she'd been thinking. Only Natasha's insistence that they find something less like work managed to break up the great sci-fi debate with Darcy's questionable dignity intact.

The Lord of the Rings was a weekend-long marathon in the wake of Advanced Idea Mechanics unearthing the remains of a Hydra base and picking up where the technology left off. They'd waited to watch these, because Steve wanted to read the books through properly first, and Darcy knew Bruce had been rereading them too. Her own copies were dog-eared, and Fellowship was halfway to losing its back cover.

Watching Steve inhale in wonder as the Nine Walkers came up over the crest of the mountain made Darcy's eyes bright and her chest full.

When Darcy finally bought a new ipod (again), she picked up an extra one. It wasn't hard to find podcasts of old radio programs these days, and she had a list of shows from the years that Steve had missed. And if she transferred Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, the Lone Ranger, and Bob Hope onto her own ipod as well as his... Things were more fun if you could talk about them with someone. 

And if 'because aliens' was enough of a reason to end up in this job, then 'because Steve' was definitely reason enough to stay.


End file.
